The Age of the Electronic Loner

The fall of Arlen Specter and the rise of Rand Paul don’t make an overnight revolution in American politics. Instead, they continue trends that have been with us for a while: the decline of party establishments, the erosion of the center in Congress, the power of media (mainly conservative) to control the political agenda. We are seeing the rise of the politician as electronic loner, brought to power in a system that looks more like direct democracy than republican government.

The Senate used to be dominated by men like Specter. Lyndon Johnson called them “whales”—lifers, committee chairmen, able to work on both sides of the aisle and forge coalitions around specific issues, nakedly opportunistic in some of their political calculations. A few decades ago, no one minded when an eighty-year-old ran for reëlection on promises to keep bringing home the bacon. Today, with the electorate in a state of perpetual outrage, Specter’s maneuverings to hold his seat are taken as unseemly, like an old man chasing after a young thing in a skirt.

Less than a few decades ago, Republican voters would never have defied their most powerful politician—in this case, Mitch McConnell—and nominated a party outsider like Rand Paul. It’s almost certain that Paul will win in November, and when he gets to Washington he’ll make Jim Bunning seem like a dull, go-along-to-get-along insider. The prototype for Republican senators these days is no longer McConnell, and it certainly isn’t an aging centrist like Richard Lugar. It’s Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who holds office not to legislate but to blow things up, who doesn’t need to make party elders happy because he can create his own base of support by making himself irresistible to cable news. Rand Paul will up DeMint’s ante, and “the world’s greatest deliberative body” will continue its descent into mass-media hell.

Barack Obama is himself a kind of electronic loner—think of his Internet fundraising—but he’s also a product of a sober, meritocratic establishment that has fallen into widespread disrepute. His challenge from the beginning of his Presidency has been to stay ahead of the wild churn of political feeling, bring it under control, and avoid being drowned in it. No easy task, and it just got a little harder.